4 Reasons for Law Students to be Thankful This Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is upon us once again and everyone’s coming up with schmaltzy reasons for us to be thankful, most of which don’t apply to law students. Instead of the after-school-special saccharine-sweet process of counting our blessings though, let’s take a look at what we law students actually have to be thankful for.

Getting caught up. Not on family connections or anything as unimportant as that, but finals are just around the corner and now you have an entire 4-day weekend you can use to finally get around to outlining. At least, you can do that if you’re a 1L or a 2L. If you’re a 3L, you can catch up on drinking and largely not giving a shit. Or, you know, spamming job applications to every posting you can find on your school’s Symplicity site in the panicked realization that you’re going to have to pay those student loans back sometime.

Holiday drinking. Everyone drinks on holidays and that makes it all that much easier to hide your burgeoning lawyerly drinking problems. When everyone else is getting tanked, no-one notices that you’ve been quietly keeping yourself pickled for the past 48 hours because you don’t want to think about the paper you have coming due on the Tuesday you’re back after the break. Besides, how else does your family expect you to deal with having to listen to your uncle lecture you on how horrible it is that your “satanic” state just legalized marriage equality? “Yes, yes, pit of sin and all that. Look, it’s been a fascinating 45 minutes, but this bottle of gin seems to be empty now . . . .”

Free food. This one may not apply if you don’t have family around, but in that case you also don’t have to deal with fundamenta6ist uncles, so it might be a worthwhile tradeoff. For us lucky law students though, this means that we’ve finally got access to food that isn’t frozen pizza or ramen noodles. Play your cards right and you’ve got a week’s worth of lunches that don’t also include 400% of your daily recommended allowance of sodium and a shelf life of 50 years.

Reality hasn’t hit just yet. There’s still some solace to be taken in the fact that even if you’re a 3L you still have at least a little bit of a reprieve before the real world rears its ugly head and you’re stuck having to deal with the reality of an economy that’s likely to stay depressed for the foreseeable future and six-figure non-dischargeable debt. Even if all you have left is a semester’s worth of classes, you should be thankful that you still probably have at least another year before friends and family start wondering why you still don’t have a job, so take the opportunity to start getting ahead of that and working on your explanation. The way things are going, you’ll need it.

That’s all I’ve got. Some might say it’s a little depressing. I just say that it’s about time to refill my G&T and get back to tweaking my resume for a job posted by BP on my school’s symplicity site. Defending gross polluters isn’t so bad if they’re helping you pay your rent and student loan, right?